Salary: $72,000 to $115,000 USD, depending on experience
Summary: A researcher focusing on organizational design and operations at RP, helping improve our entire organization, especially as the complexity of our longtermism team grows.
A good fit for:
Researchers interested in organizational design
Researchers interested in seeing their research applied immediately
People with backgrounds in experimental research
I thought this role is unique, interesting, valuable and really deep.
Can you write a little bit about the motivation or approaches this could take? E.g. what might the wins be?
Quick, low quality, thoughts that motivate my interest (the content below doesn’t need an response):
I guess that normally execs provide this sort of meta-work. The RP leadership team seems skilled and thoughtful. It seems notable you seem to be cutting out a specific role for this.
It’s fascinating to imagine what the experimentation or programme this role could pursue. I imagine there is “existing literature” on related topics, where sometimes people find there is a large supply of advice of mixed quality. I think your insight and effectiveness to be very high and it would be interesting to get a sense of the angle/perspective/approach from RP’s team of this role.
An obvious drawback is that it can be costly to tweak things when things are working well (“too many cooks”). I guess maybe one reason you are doing this, is that this could produce useful information or other public goods for other organizations.
Sure thing! I am really excited about this position. I think the main motivation is that there are a lot of things where it seems like there ought to be summaries of the evidence for what the best practice is on an operational question, but there just isn’t good information out there. So, we’re hoping that some combination of literature review and self-experimentation can help us ensure we are operating efficiently and intelligently as we grow.
In response to your specific thoughts:
I definitely think our exec teams work on these questions, but we’d like a deeper level of analysis than we typically have time for. I think one issue for our management team is that there are many competing and important demands on their time. So having someone specifically look into these questions from a research angle and making recommendations to our exec team seems useful.
I think that the existing literature is often way too general to be applied to RP.
E.g. a lot of the literature about hiring is not about specific roles, but about entire classes of work (e.g. “knowledge work”). I’d like to know how to best hire researchers for doing research on EA topics. The best way to figure that out seems to be just to look at our own practices and see what works and doesn’t, and to do that systematically. I’m hoping we are now hiring for enough positions with regularity that we can have some power in these analyses.
One issue we’ve run into is that operational research tends to be deeply mixed in with people’s opinions about operations, and if those opinions don’t align with our perspective or don’t account for some particularity at our organization, the research doesn’t end up being super useful. So having someone who understands our perspective / approach while looking at the literature or doing direct research seems really helpful.
I think one important question for this role will be “how do we stay nimble/flexible as we grow?” I think RP has had a fairly strong attitude of not letting perfect be the enemy of the good in our organizational design, and this has served us really well, but often means there is room for improvement. And, we really aren’t a static organization—we are growing and just changing, so someone paying attention and ensuring that our operations are changing with the organization is really helpful. I definitely think concerns about breaking things that are already working are good ones, but I think there are many areas where the improvements to be made are substantial enough to spend a lot of resources on it.
I thought this role is unique, interesting, valuable and really deep.
Can you write a little bit about the motivation or approaches this could take? E.g. what might the wins be?
Quick, low quality, thoughts that motivate my interest (the content below doesn’t need an response):
I guess that normally execs provide this sort of meta-work. The RP leadership team seems skilled and thoughtful. It seems notable you seem to be cutting out a specific role for this.
It’s fascinating to imagine what the experimentation or programme this role could pursue. I imagine there is “existing literature” on related topics, where sometimes people find there is a large supply of advice of mixed quality. I think your insight and effectiveness to be very high and it would be interesting to get a sense of the angle/perspective/approach from RP’s team of this role.
An obvious drawback is that it can be costly to tweak things when things are working well (“too many cooks”). I guess maybe one reason you are doing this, is that this could produce useful information or other public goods for other organizations.
Hey Charles!
Sure thing! I am really excited about this position. I think the main motivation is that there are a lot of things where it seems like there ought to be summaries of the evidence for what the best practice is on an operational question, but there just isn’t good information out there. So, we’re hoping that some combination of literature review and self-experimentation can help us ensure we are operating efficiently and intelligently as we grow.
In response to your specific thoughts:
I definitely think our exec teams work on these questions, but we’d like a deeper level of analysis than we typically have time for. I think one issue for our management team is that there are many competing and important demands on their time. So having someone specifically look into these questions from a research angle and making recommendations to our exec team seems useful.
I think that the existing literature is often way too general to be applied to RP.
E.g. a lot of the literature about hiring is not about specific roles, but about entire classes of work (e.g. “knowledge work”). I’d like to know how to best hire researchers for doing research on EA topics. The best way to figure that out seems to be just to look at our own practices and see what works and doesn’t, and to do that systematically. I’m hoping we are now hiring for enough positions with regularity that we can have some power in these analyses.
One issue we’ve run into is that operational research tends to be deeply mixed in with people’s opinions about operations, and if those opinions don’t align with our perspective or don’t account for some particularity at our organization, the research doesn’t end up being super useful. So having someone who understands our perspective / approach while looking at the literature or doing direct research seems really helpful.
I think one important question for this role will be “how do we stay nimble/flexible as we grow?” I think RP has had a fairly strong attitude of not letting perfect be the enemy of the good in our organizational design, and this has served us really well, but often means there is room for improvement. And, we really aren’t a static organization—we are growing and just changing, so someone paying attention and ensuring that our operations are changing with the organization is really helpful. I definitely think concerns about breaking things that are already working are good ones, but I think there are many areas where the improvements to be made are substantial enough to spend a lot of resources on it.
Thanks, this is a really informative. This is a really exciting role, I hope the candidates will be fantastic and produce great work!